NC Renegade vs Raconteur Report: Stand Up and Fights vs Hold Your Horses

We’ve shared posts from both NC Renegade and Raconteur Reports in the past. Both sites are worthy of reading. NC Renegade recently posted the article Americans Need to Find Their Spine and Fortitude to Stand Up and Fight. It’s Time We Cut This Evil Out From Our Society. A few days later Raconteur Report posted a response titled Hold Your Horses: Crawl, Walk, Run. Again, both are worth a gander. Below is from RR’s response article:

Wes at NC Renegade has some thoughts. That’s today’s lesson topic.

Go read it. I’ll be here when you come back.

At his site, I replied:

Thanks for recapping Why.
At this point:
1) Stand up to Whom?
2) With What and Who?
3) Where, When, and How?
Most people reading this couldn’t write a 5 Paragraph Order, let alone grasp one, and about 90% of them would have to google it to even know what I’m talking about.
They have, on avg., 1/2 a weapon apiece, little ammunition, no time, funds, support, friendly forces, and for 90+% of them, zero training in any meaningful way.
We didn’t invade Normandy on December 8th, 1941.
And we didn’t get here in a day, so we won’t be getting out of it in one either.
I absolutely share your frustration, but one cannot grow a crop faster by pulling on the green shoots.
Now is a time for gathering and preparing, not taking any direct action, and making the most of temporal and financial opportunity while we have it.
“Boy, I wish we’d spent less time in training, and been less prepared and supplied” said no one ever in world history, least of all those entering a battle or embarking upon an entire war.
The first thinning of the herd will be those willing to invest the time and money to get ready for the conflict. That’ll probably move the decimal point of available forces one place to the left, automagically.
One’s time should be spent in
a) being that guy
b) doing the work
c) finding other guys doing the same
d) figuring out what to do, to whom, and when to do it
Unless you’re already a former JSOC ninja with a file cabinet full of CARVER-rated objectives, and a tight-knit vetted cadre of like-minded and capable folks, with an existing support matrix, doing anything more than that is simply a recipe for a short, interesting, and ultimately futile life.
Change my mind.

I’ve posted links to military manuals any half-dozen times for a reason, dammit, and it isn’t nostalgia.

Most of you (95%, by all polling data, though the blog stats here may skew a wee bit higher) never got any closer to a military formation than lining up outside for phys ed classes in school. And that was great in a free country but not so much for a burgeoning banana republic, with all the trimmings, which is what we are, right this minute.

So let’s talk turkey:

There are three undeniable truths operating right now in America.

I. Elections are pointless, worthless, and futile.

If you didn’t get that memo despite what happened in November, and again in GA in January, sorry to break it to you, but it’s nevertheless gospel truth.

Anyone yakking about “We’ll get ’em next time!”, “Vote Harder!”, or any variation on “MOAR Elections!” is an unredeemed delusional jackass suffering a psychotic break from reality. They should be placed in a room in a quiet glen, featuring soft music, soft lighting, soft food, and soft walls. They’re fucking nuts. Don’t waste any further breath on them until they wake up, if ever.

TINVOWOOT: There Is No Voting Our Way Out Of This.

Learn it, Live it, Love it.

Should you still pull a lever ever again? Hell yes. Enjoy whatever simulacrum of freedom you can, and maximize the time and minimize the gradient of the decline, if such be within your power. Primary out RINOs. Use it as a weed-out for whom to ever listen to, and whom to discount, forever. And a platform to shitpost, meme, rabblerouse, and generally send raspberries at TPTB, while you can. But minimize the time, energy, and funds you spend waste on electoral activities going forward, knowing the entire process is as fake as TV News and pro wrestling.

II. We’re at war, within this country, with those who hate fundamental America.

Not a debate. Not an argument. Not a fight. A W-A-R.

They want you dead. They want you rounded up and obliterated, and they want to kill your unborn babies, kidnap your living children, and poison their minds against you. In the interim, they want you unemployed, broke, dispossessed of your goods, lands, and chattels, and treated like sub-human scum, which is what they think of you, to their marrow. And they’ll stop at nothing to do exactly that. When your enemy tells you his true feelings, believe it. Mein Kampf was a blueprint for the Holocaust. Das Kapital was the blueprint and excuse for the Holodomor, the Great Leap Forward, and the Killing Fields.

Scapegoats and counter-revolutionaries will not be tolerated. You are both.

If you’re reading this, that means YOU, to a metaphysical certainty.

But there is a difference between being AT war, and warfare.

Your fight, at this point, is theoretical, philosophical, and moral.

III. You aren’t ready to fight any other kind of actual war. Yet.

As I noted to Wes, above, I share his frustration that this is so. Some of us have been trying to edumacate folks about this for years. As you might have noticed, to date, it hasn’t helped much, other than as a pressure relief valve for those of us watching the trainwreck, transfixed, aghast, and infuriated.

Which brings us to the Teachable moment, and the Action/Implementation Phase.

AIP: Get yourself ready for a war.

A) It’s going to be a shooting war, so you’d better have something to shoot with, and something to load into it. And you’d better get damned good with it. The good news is, even for GED-holding high school dropouts, that only takes a few hours a day for a couple-three weeks, even for Army Rangers and Marines. And a grand total of 260 rounds. Folks, that’s nothing, in the grand scheme. Competence is not mastery, but start with bare competence. If you’re looking for recommendations, there are plenty of good options, but the AR platform is where to start. You’ll do just fine if you pick up a Smith and Wesson MP-15, which is just a civvie M4gery. YMMV, but it’ll get anyone over the age of 12 off on the right foot. Pistol? Learn how to run a Glock. You can upgrade from all of this, (and I hope you do) but that’s the floor.

B) Once you’ve scratched the itch of your inner Gear Whore with that rifle and/or pistol, get your (overwhelming majority of Americans) fat @$$ in shape. PT. 3-5 times/week. Upper body, lower body, aerobic endurance exercise, strength-building. The shorthand for that is push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups, and running 2-3 miles. Running. Not walking, pedalling, driving, slow jogging, or anything else. Start with less distance, and slower, sure. But get to where you can run 8-minute or less miles, for at least 3 of them. That’s the standard. Two minutes of sit-ups. Max effort, and increase over time. Max push-ups and pull-ups. Lather, rinse, repeat.

C) Get healthy. Stop eating sh*t. Balanced meals, wipe out the sugar, fat, and junk food. Get your teeth fixed. Get anything else you need to taken care of. Get your booster shots for tetanus, etc. Cut back on the alcohol, and junk the nicotine habit. Spend the money you save from those vices on more important supplies. Like stored food, medical supplies, ammo, tools. You can party when you’re using the skulls of your enemies for cups. Until then, self-discipline. Medical care may not be around much longer, and healthy people fight harder, and they’re harder to kill. I repeat, get healthy.

D) Learn what an unconventional warrior needs to know. I don’t know you, or your area, or what you’re up against. You should. Then learn what you’ll need to deal with that. At a minimum, you should be focusing on what the ground forces (Army, Marines) teach their basic recruits. We may have pounded that home with a 2×4 a time or twelve on this very blog. Repetition is a teaching technique. Even if you’re too old/brokedick to participate, you should still have the knowledge in your brainpan. And if that’s the case, learn trade craft skills: scouting, spying, information-gathering, recording, encryption/decryption, transmission, collection, and analysis. Too scared? Focus on supporting activities: caching, sheltering, running a safe house, supply, small-scale manufacturing, finance, medical support, feeding, transportation (all means: truck/rail/waterborne/pack animal), repair, communications, construction, field engineering (anything from shovels to heavy equipment), and so on. If the Army has an occ field that you could do, you can be useful. On average, it takes 10 people to put one insurgent, supplied, fed, and equipped, into the field. And you’re going to need some of that tradecraft I mentioned above to not be scooped up for aiding and abetting, and winding up dead, or in prison.

E) Find (and VET!!!) other people doing A-D, above. {Hint: Over 50% of those in the @$$clown show that was Malheur were federal CIs. If you get to where your main strategy to avoid prison is jury nullification because you were a jackass about vetting, you’ve screwed the pooch beyond repair, and you deserve to die in prison. Whether or not you do is up to a merciful Deity, because TPTB will have no sense of humor, and Fate is set to Zero Fucks Given when you’re stupid.} Take your time. Sniff around. Check them out, overtly and covertly. Due diligence or die. No one will tell your story alongside that of Patrick Henry. You’ll just be the next Timothy McVeigh. Remember, you’re picking people into whose hands you’re entrusting your own life, and the fate of your family. So are they.

F) As Sam Culper has said, and taught, and teaches (take his classes!) do an Area Study. Look the term up online, find an example, and then wipe out the info paragraphs and pages for the sample you select, and refill the info with the same thing for your town/city, and county at a minimum. If it’s small enough, do your entire state, and push outward if neighboring states are closer to you, for example, than your own state capitol. E.g., New Mexico (and Mexico!) info is going to be a helluva lot more relevant in El Paso than info about Dallas, Houston, and/or Austin. Just saying. If you’re in Rhode Island, you should be looking at all of New England. For a good guideline, stick a pin in a map where you are. Scribe a circle to the limit of a tank of gas – say, 400-500 miles – and look hardest at that. That’s your “area of interest”. Same pin, then a circle of the 20 miles in any direction you could walk in a day: that’s your “area of concern”. You should know both intimately, for all topics in your sample Area Study. This is what Sun Tzu meant when he said “know your enemy” and “know the ground”.

That’s already five more things than most people out there have done, and it’s enough to get you started.

Provided you start getting started.

Whatever you haven’t done, above, is where you are. Get busy with that, FIRST. Leviathan isn’t going to wait all day before taking an interest in you.

Raconteur Report Reminds “Tourniquets Work”

From Aesop at Raconteur Report, Medical Tip: Tourniquets Work reminds you to get tourniquet training if you don’t have it already.

One of the local constabularies recently encountered Nameless Crazy Person with butcher knife in hand, agitated and in a stabby mood. Despite repeated commands, NCP refused to drop knife, and/or broke the containment bubble, whereupon officer plugged NCP. Unknown number of rounds fired, but two connected.

One to each arm. (-25 points for lousy marksmanship at knifefighting – which is knifefight dying – distance. Bonus points for unintended humanitarian efforts.)

One nicked the right outer bicep. Literally, a flesh wound. Rub some dirt on it (or, in this case, a wad of 4x4s) and walk it off. No harm, no foul.

Other round: in the stabby knife-wielding arm, 9mm or 40SW pellet entered the upraised left arm proximal to the inner elbow, and travelled along the near-horizontal upper arm, and exited just below the left armpit (axilla for medical types).

Neither round close to anything obviously vital, except…

Round #2, during its journey through the meaty bicep area, must obviously have punctured/torn/lacerated the L brachial artery, i.e. the one what all the blood from Mr. Heart travels in to arrive in the rest of Mr. Arm.

Result: a steady blurp-blurp-blurp of bright red blood, all over the ground.

To his everlasting credit, Constable quickly applied first an Israeli Battle Dressing to the arm of the now knifeless suspect, to whom the application of lead had reduced his crazy efforts noticeably. Which IBD application slowed the blurp-blurp nary a whit.

So, reverting to academy-standard (nowadays) training, he whipped out his CAT Tourniquet, and lashed that sucker down just like in training videos, and turned off the blurp-blurp in about 6 twists of the windlass, despite the pained response from NCP.

Medics brought NCP to our world, where our trauma nurse and trauma doc were certain that applying a TQ was waaaaaay overkill, but “Bless their hearts for doing too much instead of too little”. So, they untwisted that TQ, and were immediately rewarded with blurp-blurp-blurp of bright red arterial blood, again.

I twisted the TQ back on and tightened it, and we sent NCP directly to trauma surgery for vascular repair, so that he could continue to be crazy with two functioning arms.

And I told the paramedics and the PD officer responsible for the TQ that they’d saved an actual life with that thing, because NCP would have died at the scene in about two minutes if they hadn’t tourniquetted off the flow of arterial blood from a “mere” arm wound. Which not only saved his life, it prevented about two trees-worth of resultant officer-involved homicide paperwork.

TL;DR:

Put the effing TQ on if the bleeding doesn’t stop with pressure, and make it holy by cranking the hell out of it.

You needn’t carry four TQs on your body, but you have four limbs, so if you like them, and you enjoy living, you’d be well-advised to have four TQs somewhere close by, like kit/pack/bag, etc.

Not at home in your medicine cabinet 20 miles away.

When you need one (or, God forbid, more than one) it will be Right Effing NOW, and not “in twenty minutes or so”.

If you’d rather ignore that advice: Suture self.

FTR, trauma literature based on medical trauma data from Sandbox I and Sandbox II have documented applications of as long as 4 hours before removal in surgery with no residual harm of any kind to extremities as a result of the TQ application, in young, otherwise-healthy, military-aged troops. YMMV, but they are not in any way “sacrificing a limb to save a life”, anytime in the last 20 years. If you’re within that time span for arrival at definitive medical care, and it’s medically justified, it’s better to slap one on than watch your patient exsanguinate and die.

And now, refresher training for those who wish it:

“This sh*t works!” – everyone who’s ever needed one.

Thus endeth the lesson.

Raconteur Report on Getting Value from Military Manuals

Any preparedness-minded person who has spent time researching topics on the internet has most likely come across a bevy of people recommending various military manuals — from any one of several Survival manuals to medical handbooks and beyond. Here is Aesop from Raconteur Report with Milking Knowledge From the .Mil’s Cow

In response to “What? Which? Where? How” sorts of questions in response to Saturday’s post, a little guidance from the Information Desk is hereby dispensed.

Why Buy A Cow When Milk Is Free?

Other than the relatively few classified (which I can’t tell you about, unless I kill you afterwards…Oh yeah, right, smartypants. Like what? That’d be things like SERE/POW detailed training instructions on things like escape, resistance to interrogation, etc.; anything whatsoever to do with nuclear weapons and other WMDs, such as any specifications, types, deployment plans, allocation lists, compatible platforms/delivery systems, or even the list of units on the distribution list for same; cryptographic equipment, tank armor details, radar system specs, known weapon system weak points, and any number of other sensitive items and tidbits. Which, even if Ivan or Wang has a copy of already, is still not something we want falling into Pedro or Hadji’s grubby little fingers.) manuals, the vast majority are public information, and available from the US Government Printing Office (with a check and a request). However, their prices are rarely competitive, esp. when a plethora of sites distribute them as e-manuals for the unbeatable price of $0.

So, Rule 1: Get your field manuals for free. Period.

Anyone charging anything over bare materials cost and/or handling is ripping you off, and you’re the sucker. The exceptions are

a) anything you have found to be unobtanium (provided its classification status doesn’t make you a spy liable to prosecution for mere possession), or

b) anything you find that beats the cost of bandwidth plus printing yourself.

I.e., if someone’s selling a manual you want for $2, and printing it out yourself would cost you $5, plus the value of your monthly bandwidth prorated for how many megs/gigs you downloaded, then by all means, scoop it up.

IF:

It’s in good shape.

It’s legible.

It’s complete.

I’ve been burned by reprints done in some Hong Kong whorehouse where all the meticulous 1960s-era line drawings were reproduced on a refurbed drug store copier with 20 years’ accumulation of puke and schmutz on the glass liner, and they look like blobs of indecipherable black ink. Those are fit only for fireplace kindling, or outhouse back-up reserve stock of paper products. Caveat emptor.

Rule 2: Latest does not always equal greatest.

E.g.: I will bet you dollars to donuts that Ranger Training Manuals from before Big Green went all gender-diversity friendly asinine and stupid, and put booster steps in front of the log wall on the o-course, will be a bit more useful than will manuals produced more recently or in the near future, to be useable by all 57 genders in the upcoming Fabulous-Friendly Queer Eye For The Gender-Fluid Rainbow Rump Ranger: Pink Barbie Edition. Just saying.

For another example, I have multiple generations and iterations of FM 5-20, Field Fortifications. I can assure you that the post-nuclear-era Vietnam War version does not cover artillery-proof dugouts, trenches, and bunkers nearly as well as the pre-WWII version does, from before nukes, but after the experience of 4 years of trench warfare all across Europe. In VN, we did not dig shelters nearly as deep, nor bunkers as sturdy, as we had prior to 1945. Our enemy shelled the shit out our bases regularly, while employing tunnel systems to shelter, rest, hide, and regroup. So, how did those plans work out for the two sides, respectively?

This is why you might not want only the most recent edition(s) of any given manual, nor series of them.

Conversely, Rule 3: Latest and greatest can often be a great place to start.

How so? The copy of ST 31-91B Special Forces Medical Handbook most frequently found at gun shows, surplus shops, etc. is great – if you want a 60-year-old medically obsolete piece of shit that belongs in a museum. (At least, unless your only knowledge of wound care is rubbing dog poo on it and sacrificing a chicken.) Or if you have a table with one leg an inch shorter than the others, and need to level the table. If you want to know the best way to render medical care now, the 2020-era Special Operations Forces Medical Handbook is what you want.

Sure, get both, but only if you download the dinosaur version for free, and only keep it as reference, in case you wonder about how they used to do something when JFK was the president, and neither Motrin nor CT scans had been invented yet.

Rule 4: Download EVERYTHING!!!!!!!

Electrons are damned near free. A Cruzer thumb drive the size of a stack of 3-4 nickels can hold 256 Gigs. That’s room for every military manual ever invented, and your porn stash, plus all the Harry Potter movies, the entire Muppet Show collection, and all the Looney Tunes, all in HiDef, With room to spare. For less than $31.

Rule 5: Dead tree PRINTED copies are immune to EMP degradation.

If you like it, you should have put 3 rings on it, after you printed it out. If you haven’t printed it out, you don’t own it. You’re just holding a digital copy until you smash/erase/lose that copy.

You want to become an information warlord, for yourself, your tribe, or The Future?

1) Get either unlimited, or A Metric F**kton, of bandwidth.

2) Download everything you can get your mitts on.

3) Figure out how much space it takes, and then duplicate 10, 20, 50, 100, eleventy gajillion library copies on some thumb drives or DVDs, to give away to like-minded folks.

4) Print hard copies on archival paper, for your own library usage.

5) Get Adobe Acrobat, so you can create pdfs yourself.

6) Get a scanner, so that if you find an unobtanium manual that’s not a violation of national security to possess, you can scan it in its entirety, and pass it along for free to everyone else.

Rule 6: Learn How Military Manuals Work.

As big and dumb as the giant Green/Blue Weenie of Militardation is, there is a method to their madness, and you can learn it. You don’t know what you want, or should get, or should look for next? No problem.

Say you get a copy of Survival (anyone’s edition, any service, and numbering system – hint: there are now multiple numbering systems for military manuals. Because Pentagon.) Every military manual contains a listing of References. I.e., other manuals with more to say on the topic in general, or some specific aspect. Telling you that a compass is a great thing is a good point in Survival. But way better when you find out there’s a whole other manual on just Map Reading and Land Navigation. And another one on Desert Operations. And another on Cold Weather Operations. And another one on Jungle Operations. Each of which refer to Road Marches. And Field Hygiene And Sanitation. And to the M-16AWhateverversion rifle. Individual Tactics and Patrolling will point you to Fire Team and Squad Tactics, The Rifle Platoon, the Rifle Company, and Battalion Operations. Now you’ve gone from running one person (you) to running 500 people.

Like a YouTube or other internet wormhole, you can follow an idea or topic to the farthest related reaches of the known universe, through any manual’s References.

Do it.

Where do I find all this stuff?

About 100 places on the internet, with a couple of mouseclicks.

Personal recommendations:

Global Security

Go wild.

Archive.org.

Like going to a great old used book store, where the price on everything in the store is $0.

Survival Ebooks

500 free manuals.

Military Field Manuals

468 free manuals.

Federation of American Scientists

The little communist Anti-American bastards put the manuals online, to embarrass the military.

Whatever, commie pigs.

Same manuals, same low price: free.

There are dozens more, but those will keep you busy for quite a good while.

Nota bene for these and any other sites: scan your downloads, beware of malware, and if anything trips your virus scanner, blow it up without opening, just like EOD does.

I’m not responsible if you bring Trojan horse VD into your hard drive, so apply due diligence.

But with a modicum of cyber-savvy and caution, you can amass a library of invaluable information on an enormous range of topics, for nothing, or close to it.

Knowledge is power.

I’ve just given you the keys to the nuclear plant.

Make good use of what you find, and loot until you can’t do it anymore, or you’ve got it all.

Then, be a dandelion: reproduce what you’ve got, and scatter it in all directions.

Raconteur Report: Good Luck With That Plan

Aesop at Raconteur Report gives his opinion on DC shenanigans in Good Luck with that Plan.

Meme from Sal the Agorist

For reference, in Iraq and A-stan, Uncle’s guys only had a few tens of thousands of insurgents with which to contend. IIRC, the number that comes to recollection is around 50K or so. Britistan, from 1969-1999, was never confronted by more than a few thousand active Provos in the IRA, and it bled them and tied them up handily for three decades before everyone knocked off by mutual consent.

His Fraudulency is potentially facing millions.

Seems legit.

Forget the happygas: I suspect the next few years are likely to be some of the worst times seen in these parts in 150 years and more.

BTW, proof that no insurrection was ever intended earlier this month: they have upwards of 30K troopies from the Notional Guard in DC, now.

We had 400,000 people on the National Mall on the 6th. That would have been 6 complete D-Day invasions-worth of American troops. Eisenhower didn’t have that many troops in France after the Normandy D-Day Invasion until July, a month later. If the MAGA crowd had actually wanted or intended to go all seize-the-government, (besides obviously not bringing a shit-ton more guns, nor any intent to hurt anyone) they could have conquered DC, Virginia, and Maryland, and held it indefinitely, with an army that size. (For reference, 400,000 people is approximately twice the size of the Marine Corps, anytime since the Vietnam War.) “Insurrection” my ass. That was a staged photo op co-opted by BLM/Antifa, for DNC propaganda gaslighting purposes, as we’ve seen non-stop every day since it happened. There aren’t enough cops east of the Appalachian Mountains to contend with a crowd that size were same intent on misbehaving, even if the po-po had been as inclined to murder as was one trigger-happy Barney Fife, determined to go all Tiananmanen Square on unarmed marchers, from safely behind a barricaded door.

If that crowd had been actually and truly hostile, those cops would have been found with their badges shoved up their asses, their severed jangly bits in their mouths, and their decapitated heads mounted as decorations on the spiked tips of the metal fence around the Capitol, and a few thousand marchers would have been wearing sweatshirts afterwards that said “Now I have a machinegun. Ho-Ho-Ho”

That crowd was no such vengeful mob, or the lists of dead PD the next day would have looked like the crawls on TVs after 9-11. These were clearly not the revolutionaries the gaslighting media and deranged Democommunist leadership keeps trying to invent.

“Revolt” my ass. That was a Sunday church picnic, kicking sand in the faces of a pack of shitweasels. No more, no less. To those thinking things will ever again be that peaceful this side of their appointments with a gibbet and noose, my only reply is

“Yippee Ki Yay, m*****f*****s.”

Meanwhile, the mainstream “conservative” broadcast punditry, and much of the online versions as well, seems content as a pig in sh*t to cuck-cuck-cluck about how they’re going to “Get ’em next time!” and “Vote Harder!” at them in 2022 and 2024, as if we didn’t just watch that ship sail right into an iceberg and kill everyone on board, twice, in the last two months. Everyone babbling bullshit about solving this at the ballot box is entirely delusional, and has suffered a psychotic break with reality. They should be locked up somewhere with soft food, soft music, and soft walls, until they die, or come to their senses, and I don’t particularly care which, at this point. They’re worse than worthless, and contribute nothing but active disinformation 24/7, which inarguable truths are the only reason why they’re still permitted to broadcast their tiddly twaddly codswallop on the public airwaves. That assessment is true for the entire goddamned LOT of them, BTW, lest there be any misunderstanding.

Yesterday, guy I was talking to about whether/when things go frisky noted “Nobody wants to be the one to go first.”

True enough.

But the thing you need to remember, given the numbers of us versus the number of them, is that once it does kick off, no one will want to be left out before there’s no more minions and/or Democommunists to shoot.

Ponder on that.

Then remember that in any group, there’s an absolute minimum number of short bus window-lickers that can’t be controlled. Just like with Kung Flu, those Gilligans – from either side – are going to be what sparks the fuse on the powder keg on which we’re all sitting.

Doubt me?

Okay. Tell me please, who fired that first shot on Lexington Common 245 years ago… I’ll wait over here while you’re working out that answer.

Oh, BTW, those 30K guys in D.C.? Mostly NG MP units (per Big Country Expat’s info). Who are, overwhelmingly, civilian LE types in their day jobs. So Team Fraudulent has essentially stripped the entire Eastern seaboard cities and counties near those units of a good number of their regular police officers.

That shouldn’t have any downside, should it…?

Me, I’m going shopping this weekend, at a couple of GI surplus haunts.

You never know what useful items you might find in nooks and crannies until you look.

Raconteur Report: Keeping It Real

Aesop of Raconteur Report talks about how the COVID-19 pandemic is currently affecting the So. Cal. hospital in which he works in Anecdotally: Keeping It Real.

About that pandemic you might think we’re not having:

Nameless SoCal Hospital is full, bottom to top, wall to wall.

Because elective surgeries are cancelled, those nurses normally doing anesthesia recovery are now caring for overflow patients.

Nurses on floors normally holding stable telemetry patients are caring instead for ICU patients, because the ICU is full, wall-to-wall, and has been for days, so when someone gets worse, they can’t be moved to higher care, and the floors are stuck with them.

ER is holding ICU patients, now for multiple days. Entire ER is now set up for COVID isolation, which is running 75-90% of patients seen, 24/7. And those are only the ones too sick to send home.

Morgue overflow conex cold storage is now full of corpses. Who died from COVID, not just with COVID. We ran out of body bags day before yesterday, so until we got more, deceased patients had to stay in occupied rooms. Even with getting decedents out, new dead are piling up faster than we’re getting old ones off to coroner or mortuaries.

In the only state out of 50 with mandatory safe nursing:patient staffing ratios, those ratios have been thrown out indefinitely because of the current emergency. Because apparently an international emergency means we can use magic to do what we can’t do when we’re not redlined, at 110% of capacity and ability. (Roll two D6 to cast Spell Of Magical Healing.) I haven’t asked, but I’m pretty sure the Official Answer to overcrowded hospitals will be: Bunk beds! No, really.

Nearby hospitals have gotten so bad, some nurses have walked off the job. No small part of that is the ongoing insufficient supplies of PPE necessary to do the job without getting sick. We’re not there yet here, but morale is low, and the troops are pissed. And if someone calls in and says “I have a fever”, there’s not much anyone can say. It’s coming, in 3, 2,…

Between staff shortages and actual sick staff, we’re starting the day with 50% staffing in some units, and it’s virtually impossible to get hired guns to come in. Everyone is over this, and all they get by picking up registry work or extra shifts where they work, is more sh*t sandwich, every day, into infinity. And you can’t spend bonuses if you’re dead.

And in L.A. County, everything I just wrote? Worse. Squared.

Oh, and we’re still weeks away from the peak of the current surge, which is simply the sum total of people who decided Halloween and Thanksgiving get-togethers were more important than silly COVID restrictions, with predictable results.

We’re all dreading what happens when we get the Christmas/New Year’s Stupidity Surge, 3-5 weeks from now, but it’s definitely coming.

Things are spiffy where you are? Outstanding. Goody for you. No, really. Hope your luck holds.

Meanwhile, I’m hearing from nurses who blog in other states, e.g. Texas, that they’re getting, now, what we had here in Apr-July, and hospital manglement (not a typo. -A.) there learned nothing from what happened in NYFS, NJ, Atlanta, Nawlins, or CA, and accordingly planned for no such thing.

No points for guessing how that’s paying dividends for them now. (Two of the reasons I’m lifetime-banned from hospital administration is because I tested with an IQ over 80, and my parents were married, to each other.)

The next phase beyond this is when the healthcare system starts to collapse. That is already nibbling around the edges of things now. When we get to full collapse, we’ll be Italy: we’re going to have to start to decide who we see, and save, and who we move over to the “It was a good life, and best wishes” area for no further treatment. No one has broached the topic openly, so the docs haven’t decided whether they’ll sort out the oldest, the sickest, or just throw darts at the Big Board when they’re forced to actually decide who lives, and who dies. Mainly, they’re just hoping real hard we don’t get to that phase, ever. If we do, the word “unprecedented” is hardly going to cover our New Normal.

Of course, all this is just like we’ve done in every seasonal flu season for the last 90 years. (/sarc) NOT.

Keep pushing horsesh*t theories and crackpot stayed-in-a-Holiday-Inn-Express-once medical mail-order diploma explanations of what’s REALLY happening. We need the comedy relief.

Those of us holding the shitty end of the stick with gloved hands are too busy to give a wet fart for such prognostications, but to a person, everyone of them has expressed that the Internet jet-fuel geniuses who think this is a scam should STFU, and pull a shift here, any day of the week, with their eyes and ears open, and their pieholes shut.

Most of you would last about half an hour before you left skidmarks out the back door.

We don’t want thanks, or Starbucks gift cards, or hazard pay raises (though we wouldn’t turn any of those down). We knew the job was tough when we took it. We just wish the Gilligans driving this day in, day out, would stop being such overachieving jackholes, and use some common goddam sense, just for the novelty, if for no other reason. It stopped being cute to be blisteringly stupid about nine months ago.

And if you think there isn’t going to be a reckoning down the road that grabs you by the short curlies for the jackassery we’re seeing and dealing with now, once this is over with, I’m here to tell you, you’ve got another think coming.Think long and hard about that. TPTB in the medical field have memories like elephants, and you aren’t going to like what you get, nor get what you like. And health insurers will once again be driving the No Sense Of Humor bus, regarding future lifestyle choices. Mark my words.

The brighter lights among you, which has thankfully been a majority, had best make plans accordingly.

You will see this material again, and probably sooner rather than later, but even if not, being prepared for anything even roughly similar means you don’t have nearly as much to worry about, no matter what rolls down the pipe at you the next time Fate pulls the chain on the Flush Bowl of Life.

Raconteur Report: COVID – Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

Healthcare professional Aesop at Raconteur Report talks about the current COVID-19 resurgence in Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics.

Much has been made by bloggers whom and on sites which I respect, about certain prognostications by Mssr. Briggs, statistician, regarding Kung Flu.

I’m not quibbling about his numbers, just what he makes of them, evidently from an utter lack of knowledge about that of which he speaks.

Unfortunately, Briggs’ combines his statistical skills with what he doesn’t know about science in general, and epidemiology in particular.

1) There are, indeed, “good” flu years, and “bad’ flu years. But it’s not a 1- or 2- variable problem set.

a) there are always older people, some of whom are more frail, and many of whom are going to die. But surviving flu one year doesn’t, ergo, make you another year older and thus more likely to die the next year. That’s kindergarten math thinking.

b) How many other conditions does any given grandpa or grandma X have?

c) What is their general health condition?

d) Did they get a flu shot that year, or not?

d1) Did the flu vaccine witch doctors guess the actual flu strain mutations well, and formulate a great shot (a year with a 95% efficacy) or poorly (a year with 15% efficacy). {e.g., in 2018, IIRC, there were 635 individual strains of flu rampant in the US, and that year’s shot had about a 15% effectiveness. This is nigh on to worthless, relatively speaking.}

d2) Was there even a flu shot at all?

(In, to my best recollection, 2010, there was no flu vaccine available at all. Whichever year it was, it was a record low flu year. Because CDC and FedGov bombarded the airwaves with PSAs telling people to “Wash your goddamned nasty hands! Stay home if you’re sick!” in so many words, and mirabile dictu, old people and parents of young children actually did it. Flu visits to the ER that year were negligible.)

That exact level of concern, plus masks, and distancing, is why, by all accounts, this year’s flu season cases will probably be contained in a thimble.

Those are just some of the 100-500 variables behind who dies, and why, from flu, Kung Flu, or any other thing, in any given year. Not just whether it was a “good” or “bad” flu year, last year.

Yes, it was world-record @$$holian to put known COVID+ cases into convo homes, which are the lowest form of medical care other than anything found in the Turd World, and you get a perfect storm of the most vulnerable patients, and the most execrable level of care not delivered by actual gypsies and witch doctors (and in most convo homes, there’s little difference between them. The fact that they reek of sh*t and piss the moment you walk in is what poker players call a “tell”.) Those deaths were, indeed, low-hanging fruit.

That such deaths may have accounted for nearly half the initial wave is bad.

It does nothing for the next wave, unless you stop doing that. I have yet to hear that it’s no longer policy. And even if it was, that overlooks the obvious problem: Kung Flu presents asymptomatically in up to 50% of cases (which is why checking for fever temperatures at building entries is like looking for elephants in trees: asinine and pointless.)

If they really wanted to keep infected people out of convo homes (which are still chock full of vulnerable patients, in 50 states and 7 territories), they’d have to be rapid-testing every patient they admit, before entry, and rapid-testing every staff member, daily, and every single visitor, vendor, etc., and holding them in quarantine outside until they test negative (an hour or two later). We don’t even do that in first-class hospitals.

Doing so would cost a large fortune, and bankrupt everyone, everywhere.

So the exact same thing is going to happen, over and over and over, because you won’t pay for doing it right. No one will.

Own that.

It’s the exact asymptomatic Gilligans – the young and “healthy”, who won’t get really sick nor die from this – who have been and will continue spreading this virus around, until it hits the susceptible victims, and makes a guaranteed percentage of them very sick, and some of them very dead.

Some of them, yes, will be the aged, infirm, and those with levels of disease that were killing people at age 66 in 1933. (That’s why FDR had Social Security kick in at age 65; FedGov expected you to be dead within a year. And then medicine, the same bunch that know-nothing idiots bitch about for the cost, went and started increasing everyone’s life expectancies to the 80s. See if you can guess why SS is broke.)

And yes, we know a little bit better what to do (and not to do) to care for those hardest hit by Kung Flu. Which will make about a 1-25% difference in fatalities in subsequent waves. Because those in the roughly 3% likely to die, are still going to die. So maybe now the death rate goes down from about 3% to 2.7%. (The death rate for flu, BTW, is about 0.1%, since ever. Don’t you feel better now, knowing this is only 27 times worse than flu, instead of 30 times?)

The biggest problem with those prognosticating from ignorance in general is overlooking the fact that most of the population, in this or any country, has yet to be exposed to the virus.

E.g. Califrutopia, last I looked, has tested about 10% of our 40M people.

The rate of those infected at some point, is running damned near 10%.

With millions tested now, rather than dozens, those numbers are statistically valid (unlike, say, Biden’s pre-election poll numbers) and thus (unlike Biden’s vote tallies) aren’t going to widely fluctuate. Right up until we throw open the floodgates, eliminate any precautions, and start spreading Kung Flu virus around like it was welfare money in a Blue State. (Or blank mail-in vote bundles at any Democrat HQ building.)

Then, the more people you infect, the more people will die.

Yes, only at that +/- 3% rate.

We’re pushing 250K dead now, with the infection rate of 10% in certain places (mostly highly populated areas), and probably less than 0.1% in most of the country denigrated as Flyoverland.

So, roll the dice, and tell me what happens when the infection rate goes up everywhere.

Especially if the infection rate goes up by leaps and bounds, rapidly.

And for a special bonus, in the exact places where true modern medical care is 1-4 hours away.

On a good day.

Then we get to the fun questions:

Does infection confer immunity?

I have no godd…d idea. Neither does WHO. Neither does CDC.

Neither does Pfizer, or any-effing-body else.

I have one firsthand example of repeat infection, hospitalized in front of my face.

I have dozens of cases reported anecdotally.

I have seen zero literature explaining this.

I have seen or heard of zero literature documenting exactly how widespread this is.

No one knows how much, or how widely, the original strain is mutating.

Thus any claims of vaccine efficacy are so much bulls…t.

Any claims of herd immunity are so much whistling past the graveyard.

Any extrapolation of how bad this is going to be, with those exact unknowns being so glaringly obvious, are nothing but Bandini Mountain, with a sewage frosting from downstream of the septic plant.

Do I want fiat lockdowns again?

HELL NO!

Make a case, trot out evidence, not SWAG bulls…t, and weigh the benefits and costs.

Medical, scientific, economic, everydamnedthing. Talk it over, and think it through, FIRST.

Then have the legislatures pass laws, or not, and have governors sign or veto them.

Y’know, like republican government has worked going back to, oh Magna Carta, or even Rome and Greece. If only for the novelty.

I went over a month in a SoCal ER with no likely COVID patients. I tell you, it was heaven. A crappy night with no COVID patients was like old times.

That ended last week. Just about 3 weeks behind the spike in cases, we just had, on my shifts alone, 3 slam-dunk sure-as-hell-got-it COVID patients. I had 2 of them personally, and one of them was the re-infection case I wrote about previously. When I left yesterday, we had a guy who literally desatted from 80% to 60% oxygen level in the two minutes it took to get him from the triage tent to an iso room inside. He was in his 50s.

The ICU nurse who died from my hospital got it from a patient who was uninfected, then exposed by an asymptomatic patient in a regular ward, brought it to the ICU, and infected 10 nurses there before they knew it was a COVID case. That nurse was in her early 50s, not her late 80s.

Times, in 25 years of my career, that happens with flu: never.

Not one godd…d time.

Not even a consideration.

So I’m getting pretty damned tired of ignorant @$$holes burping out pure undiluted horses…t quotes like the following:

Young (under 65) healthy people are not being killed by the doom—or much of anything else.

Yes, they are. On a regular basis.

Pointing out that they do so at a lesser rate does nothing to remove the lie from the quote above.

And noting that old people die more often is cold comfort to someone whose 30- or 40-year old spouse died because to pointy-headed number crucncher, they were just a rounding error, or “within the margin or error”. If you don’t have to look the survivors in the eye while their loved one’s bodies are still warm but heading for room temperature, kindly STFU about things when you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.

Suppose I told you, with absolute statistical confidence, that if you ran red lights, you only had a 3% chance of getting bashed to hell, killing someone, or going to prison.

Would you do it?

Suppose I told you that your meatloaf was 97% steak, and only 3% bullsh*t.

Would you eat it?

If you answered “yes”, how much shit could I put in your meatloaf before you’d turn it down??

You can tell me that driving is hazardous, because of drunks and idiots. I’ll still drive.

Mainly because I don’t drive 100% of the day.

But unlike bar fights, liquor store robberies, or drunk driving deaths, everybody alive on the planet breathes, non-stop, 24/7/365, without any choice in the matter.

So unless you can live isolated, or hold your breath for years on end, or live in a spacesuit 24/7, that makes a respiratory ailment in widespread circulation one hell of a lot bigger concern than the other causes of death which, exactly as the CDC and Briggs note, knock off about 50,000 people every year in this country.

Which makes statistical prognostications from someone like Briggs sound to me exactly like a fresh hot steaming pile of cows…t smells.

I can listen to statistical bulls…t from people who don’t know what they don’t know, or I can believe my lying eyes, backed up by medical evidence, and common sense.

You guess where I’ma come down on that one.

In one of the comments to the above post, Aesop talks a little about the issue of co-morbidities:

BTW, people don’t die because of the co-morbidities, those just make them more likely.

Just like few, if any, people die from drunk driving because they were drunk. Unless they had a BAL of 900, and fell asleep, and stopped breathing. They die because of that pole they hit at 90MPH while drunk, and because the one leads to the other.

The people who got wrapped around the axle of deaths with COVID (or co-morbidities, like diabetes, hypertension, obesity, etc.) vs. because of. People don’t die from the co-morbidities, they died because those things sapped their body’s ability to deal with things when the COVID pneumonia in both lungs, everywhere, simultaneously, taxed their ability to breathe and survive beyond what it could handle. Generally because they were too frail, fat, old, weak, and sedentary, which is how you get to be fat, diabetic, hypertensive, etc.
But when you walk around for decades fat, sedentary, diabetic, and hypertensive, then get COVID, and die in 3 weeks, it wasn’t those co-morbidities which killed you, it was the Kung Flu.

Just like if you had all those co-morbidities, and got eaten by a lion while on safari. The lion killed you, not the co-morbidities. The co-morbidities just made you easier pickings.

What they died from, in all cases was cardio-respiratory failure caused by COVID pneumonia. Everything else just piled on to decrease their survival prospects, but noting that sick people die more frequently than healthy people isn’t exactly a blazing piece of medical insight.

People who focus on the co-morbidities like it’s an “A HA!” moment are as ignorant as the idiot-savant people that actually think guns just randomly jump up and kill people, all by themselves, and they don’t seem to get that focusing on them just underlines their ignorance on the topic.

There may be some genetic component as well, but absent evidentiary research, that’s just a Hail Mary guess by some people uncomfortable with admitting that they have NFI what causes the Kung Flu to kill 3 people, hospitalize another 7, get 30 sick, and leave 60 completely untouched. I’d rather wait for the answers rather than grunt and squeeze them out of my hindquarters.

And in the meantime, wear a mask and gloves, and wash my hands, which has worked flawlessly for 10 months, to date, in close proximity to rampant cases, to leave me uninfected.

Face Masks

There are have been a lot of untruths about face masks circulating in the US during this pandemic from both the government and the public. One of the earliest lies came from the Surgeon General in an attempt to save the limited face mask supply for the sole use of health care providers:

Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!

Two months later, an article in The New England Journal of Medicine would repeat this falsehood:

We know that wearing a mask outside health care facilities offers little, if any, protection from infection…the potential benefits of universal masking need to be balanced against the future risk of running out of masks and thereby exposing clinicians to the much greater risk of caring for symptomatic patients without a mask…

Both of these statements were obviously meant to cover for a lack of preparedness by both government and private healthcare for a large scale pandemic and resulting lacking of masks for everyone. They sought to soothe the uneducated public with the idea that they had nothing to fear while preserving scarce mask resources for front line health providers, knowing that masks would protect them. These ill-advised statements have come back to bite those who would try to limit the pandemic spread as many point back to these statements among others to counter government calls and mandates for universal mask wearing (whether such mandates are legal or not is beside the point). Of course, face masks are not 100% effective! No one is saying that they are. Can they install a false sense of security? Yes, they can. Properly worn masks should be coupled with other effective measures as a defense in depth against infection.

Masks become less effective when they are worn or handled improperly – of course. And the issue is further complicated by the type of mask worn. N95 or N99 masks are much more effective at protecting the wearer of the mask than a simple surgical mask which is designed more to protect other people from you — though the surgical mask will still offer a little protection to the wearer. These complications are what lead voices in the government and the media to recommend not wearing masks. “It’s too complicated for the average citizen,” is what they think. You can prove them wrong with a little effort.

How to properly put on and take off a face mask:

The US tends to ignore research done in foreign languages, but research about mask wearing and its effectiveness have been performed, and the positive results known, for years. The Lancet recently published an article that surveyed some of these studies, showing the effectiveness of wearing face masks – Physical distancing, face masks, and eye protection to prevent person-to-person transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19: a systematic review and meta-analysis

The use of face masks was protective for both health-care workers and people in the community exposed to infection…Our unadjusted analyses might, at first impression, suggest use of face masks in the community setting to be less effective than in the health-care setting, but …we did not detect any striking differences in effectiveness of face mask use between settings…

The chief of pediatric infectious diseases at UC Davis Children’s Hospital says that these studies show “wearing masks decreases the risk by 65 percent.”

The above sums up some of the science of mask wearing in order to prevent the spread of contagious disease. Given the contradictory, illogical, and often untrue statements previously made by officials, it is understandable that people are distrustful of recent mandatory mask statements. On top of that, there is the genuine question of government authority to make such mandates. For a very vocal portion of the liberty movement, they have decided not to even try to sort out the science of mask wearing, and instead stake their lives on their believed right to infect whomever they please. However, just because a government official may not have any authority to tell you to do or not do something, that doesn’t mean that whatever they are telling you is a bad idea. So, in case science does not sway you, here are some voices from within the prepper/liberty/tactical communities, talking about mask wearing.

John Mosby/Mountain Guerrilla:

…What is interesting to me is how viciously partisan a medical issue has become. Of course, like I said last week, it’s not surprising. We live in a time in the imperial cycle when you can’t have a conversation about the weather without it turning into a political hot potato. That is what it is.

Our state recently finally got a masks in public mandate. Now, I get it, when the government tells people to do something, they don’t want to do it. I GET it. F… the government. I agree with that. I’m still wearing a mask, because I’ve been wearing a mask since before the government suggested it. I was wearing a mask in public when the government was still telling you that masks were pointless.

I had to go to the feed store the other day. As I was walking in, I stopped outside the front door to pull my mask on. An older farmer was walking out. He saw me adjusting the mask, and snarled, “You don’t have to wear that damned thing!”

“Mister, I don’t have to do a goddamned thing.” I replied. Admittedly, I was already kind of pissy, and his attitude didn’t help mine, at all.

“Well, why are you wearing it then!?”

“I’ve been wearing a mask since January—before you’d even heard of COVID-19, because I’m not a f’ing douchebag. I’ll keep wearing my mask.”

That old man stopped and looked me up and down, TWICE. I swear, you could see the gears turning, as he debated taking a swing at me!

Now, my response probably could have been less aggressive, but…

“I’m not wearing a mask, and I don’t care if the governor and the police tell me I have to!”

“F- those BLM and Antifa protesters. If they’d just do what the police tell them, they wouldn’t get shot!”

Breaking the law—and to be clear, I don’t actually have a problem with people breaking the law. For the most part, I encourage it, in many cases—is always a matter of scale and moral values. YOU may see violating the law—a city ordinance or a state ordinance—about wearing a mask as a statement about your individual rights, just like another person sees his ability to protest against what he perceives, rightly or wrongly, to be injustice, as his individual rights. You’re made because you’re being told to wear a mask. He’s mad because he’s being told WHERE he can protest (and, under the Obama administration, remember, there was a LOT of bitching about “1st Amendment Zones” from The Right).

(And before anybody gets all — about it, obviously I recognize the difference between an act of civil disobedience and a malum in se criminal violation that is violent…although I’d also point out that not following medical advice regarding the containment of a pathogen, during a pandemic COULD be interpreted, pretty easily, as a violent act…)

If you don’t want to wear a mask? I don’t give a s#@!. Don’t wear a mask. I’m not going to call the police on you, and I’m not going to get in your face, and go all Karen on you, telling you how you should be wearing a mask. I really don’t give a s#@!. MY family is wearing n95 masks, instead of just cotton masks, because we recognize that, while a cotton mask WILL help slow the spread of pathogen, if some huge f’ing percentage of people are unwilling to participate, then we need to focus on our welfare, so we can further decrease the chances of US catching the disease, by wearing a mask with better protective value.

Am I going to judge you for not wearing a mask in public? Of course I am. I believe that self-sacrifice for the good of the community is the foundation of civic virtue, and—like the Founding Fathers—I believe without civic virtue, there are no rights. Thomas Jefferson famously wrote a letter to a congregation of Baptists at Danbury, CT once. It’s often quoted, in part, but people overlook one part of the letter:

“Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced HE HAS NO NATURAL RIGHTS IN OPPOSITION TO HIS SOCIAL DUTIES.” (emphasis added).

This is the part that everybody likes to ignore, as they complain about infringements on their “rights.” People—on both sides of the supposed aisle—want to claim that the Founders were all about liberty, which is not untrue. What they overlook however—or intentionally ignore—is the fact that every single one of them, not just Mr. Jefferson, believed, as Mr. Jefferson stated above, if you don’t fulfill your social/civic obligations, you don’t HAVE any claim to “rights.” That’s because, while they did believe in “natural” rights, they also believed that man is “naturally” a social creature, and those rights evolve from his position within a society.

So, yeah, I’m going to judge the f!@# out of you. You know what? Who cares? You don’t know me. Most of you wouldn’t know me from Adam, if you saw me on the street. Why do you care if I judge you? Maybe, when people are getting angry about being “judged” for moral transgressions (and failures in civic obligation ARE a moral transgression, however you define civic obligations), it’s not because strangers are judging them, but because they are judging themselves, and realize they are falling short. I know I’m always my own harshest critic, even if others don’t always recognize that fact.

What I’m not going to do? I’m not going to tell you you’re a piece of s#@! for not wearing a mask. I don’t need to…

Aesop of Raconteur Report (also a healthcare provider, treating COVID patients in CA):

CA gov. Gabbin’ Nuisance re-closed 30+ counties yesterday, all because of the morons that think wearing a mask is the Mark Of The Beast, and washing your hands is communism.

He was writing about wearing PPE (masks and gloves) back in April:

…people should be required to wear and use properly appropriate PPE, like masks and gloves, and given the opportunity to take responsibility for their own protection, and get out and about. I’ve taken care of 1-2 dozen Kung Flu patients already, at close range, using nothing more complicated than that. It works, and if I can do it, you darned sure can, if you have access to enough of the PPE to do it…

Aesop also commented himself on the NEJM article linked above back in May:

As a couple of posters have already referenced it, we’ll fisk this metric f**kton of bullsh…, er, rose fertilizer, originally posted in the NEJM a couple of months back, and unaccountably burped back up (or more likely, shat out) again this week.

1) That’s not a “study”. As it’s conspicuously labeled “Perspectives”, it’s sheer OPINION.
And we all know what opinions are like (and in this instance, for exactly the same reasons).
In this case, by an over-educated and under-bright pack of bumbling baboons.

2) The authors are clearly axe-grinding jackholes, their entire thesis is unsupported patent horseshit, and the purpose of wearing cloth/surgical masks (which is what 99.999% of people have on) is always to protect others from you, not to protect you from others, and anyone who doesn’t know that is not only a jackhole, they’re too stupid to be writing papers anywhere.

At their intended purpose, such masks excel, as they have for 150 years or so since they were pioneered for maintaining asepsis in surgery.

3) For bonus points, the Five Blind Mice who authored that codswallop have about 45 years of post-secondary education between them, and yet none of them noticed they contradicted themselves a couple of paragraphs after that corker:

“…fundamental infection-control measures.

Such measures include vigorous screening of all patients coming to a facility for symptoms of Covid-19 and immediately getting them masked and into a room;”

IOW, fundamental infection control is masking people to curb the spread of cough and sneeze droplets, the exact method of transmitting Kung Flu against which face masks excel.

Some people tell me I can’t fix stupid; I say I can, if you’ll let me use a big enough hammer.
Those five degreed jackasses should be horsewhipped until the whites of their bones show, and then be dipped to the neck into a vat of rubbing alcohol. Daily. For a month.

4) Don’t get fooled by something just because it’s posted by NEJM…

Chris Martensen of Peak Prosperity has been talking about the effectiveness of mask wearing since March:

COVID-19 is still a new disease. Currently, doctors and scientists are still figuring out how it works in the body and how to treat it. It will be a part of our lives in the future just like any other disease. Some people ask “Are you going to wear a mask for the rest of your life?” No. I won’t. But I will wear it until the disease is better understood, and there is a best practice for treating it other than putting the patient on a ventilator and waiting for them to die or there is some prophylaxis against it.

Even if you for some reason believe that COVID is no worse than the flu, as a prepper I hope that you have used this time to practice wearing a mask and for figuring out how many masks and other PPE you will need when a serious outbreak does hit. For example, I’ve learned around the head elastic banded masks don’t work well for me because of my huge melon head; the bands tend to break easily while donning the mask. I’ve found velcro masks work much better and are more easily donned and removed with less risk of touching contaminated surface. I’ve learned that you need a great deal more numbers of disposable PPE than I had expected previously. But if you’re not taking this disease seriously, then you probably won’t take the next seriously, either, so maybe it’s something that you don’t need to worry about in your preps.

Raconteur Report: Kung Flu Still a Thing, By The Metric …Ton

Aesop, a healthcare professional dealing with Covid patients and a long time blogger of things both preparedness and liberty-related, over at Raconteur Report writes to remind people that, yes, COVID-19 is still a real thing that can kill you, and not some government conspiracy in Coronatardation Bad News: Still A Thing, By The Metric F**kton

…I told you all that to tell you this:
The tests for Kung Flu, because of the incompetent government @$$holes at the CDC (but I repeat myself again), Suck Balls. Bigly.
The swab tests report an inordinate number of false negatives, and the antibody tests (which AFAIK no one has reliably demonstrated yet are specific to COVID-19, as opposed to all coronaviruses, like the common cold) throw out false positives, like a drunk spilling pocket change staggering down the street.
This leads to undercounting those who do have it, and overcounting those who never had, both of which inexorably undersell how many people are infected who we think have it, and oversell how deeply it’s penetrated this society. The latter is a number less than 5%, and probably less than 2%, nationally, at least anywhere outside the Five Boroughs.

Which has inevitably led medical professionals, contrary to the jackassical suggestion above, to use y’know, a clinical medical approach to making a diagnosis of presumptive Kung Flu.

“Like what, Aesop?”

Wee quaint little diagnostic tools like, say, X-rays, kids. (Common Core history grads, look up Marie Curie. #medicine # X-rays #actual things.)

For laymen, esp. those who didn’t pay attention in middle school science class, here’s what an average normal chest X-ray looks like:

Bog-simple, no problems. Spiffy, right?
What does it look like when you have ordinary pneumonia?

Mini-anatomy lesson: you have two lungs, R and L. You have 5 lobes; 3 on the right, 2 on the left. Upper, middle, and lower on the right, upper and lower on the left. (Your heart is part of the reason there’s no Left Middle Lobe.) So, look at the pic above. The red arrows in the original stolen (Fair Use, btw) image came with it. See that area of schmutzy stuff all over the right middle lobe? That’s RML PNA: Right Middle Lobe PNeumoniA. The opacity (the blurry part) indicates fluid in the alveoli (little air sacs) in the lung, which is why you can’t breathe: your lungs filled with water don’t work well underwater, because they’re lungs, not gills. That’s what bacterial pneumonia, the kind that antibiotics will treat well, and that a shot will help prevent, looks like. In elderly people, pneumonias of the lower lobes, from less physical activity, prolonged immobility, etc. are the most common, and nota bene: as in this illustration, only on ONE side. (Gunny Hints:You will see this material again.)

So what?
So, let’s look at a typical CXR (Chest X-Ray) of a Kung Flu patient:

WHOA!
Not typical.
Not even typical pneumonia.
There’s schmutz EVERYWHERE.
Schmutz? = “Ground glass opacity”.
Bilateral multifocal pneumonia.
Like you won’t see in bacterial pneumonia.
Like you’d expect to see in pneumonia caused by a respiratory inhaled virus, and/or virus-induced coagulopathy, and/or both. (Pathologists, chime in anytime.)
Which fits only Kung Flu.
You have fluid ALL OVER your lungS, plural, (and pleural! See what I did there?) on BOTH SIDES, which is why people who have this symptomatically can’t effing breathe.
Their lungs, as in the whole contraption, is full of fluid.
And if you’re hypoxic (too little oxygen in your blood stream) on room air, or worse, even on supplemental oxygen, like a nasal canula, or a face mask, you’re pretty f**ked.
If you have that, and a fever from the infection, and a cough, and this CXR, and your blood tests fit the pattern, neither I, nor anyone witrh MD or D.O. after their name, needs a gorram broke-dick CDC-approved COVID test to tell you, me, Yellow Dog, or Medicare, that you have Kung Flu!
They can see it for themselves, with their own lying eyes, and they’re not going to falsify it for some pittance of chump change from Uncle Sugar.

Go back and read the AAR from the ER doc in Nawlins (like every one of the ER MDs I know and work with did, long since): clinical indications = Kung Flu. Period. A test, good, bad, or half-assed, is a nice confirmation, but the CXR and other clinical indications are diagnostic (that means a lead-pipe cinch sure thing). Testing, at that point, is a luxury, and if it comes back opposite the clinical indications, will be completely and rightfully ignored. Because the tests are all so much bullshit, courtesy of The Usual Gang Of Idiots at CDC, plus Typical Government Incompetence.

BTW, none of these are my actual patients’ X-rays, but #3 was what the CXR looked like on my guy from this past weekend. (One of six COVID-positives I cared for, BTW.) He’s in his early twenties, kids. Not 80+. Not 70-80. Not even over 40. Barely old enough to legally buy a beer. Full coronavirus bilateral multi-focal pneumonia.

What does this mean for you?

1) Temperature screenings are going to get everyone infected.

2) Getting everyone infected means you can expect orders of magnitude more sick and dead people (from Kung Flu, not with Kung Flu, if you’re that particular brand of Coronatarded) than you’ve seen so far.

3) Lockdowns largely stopped this, but
a) we cannot, and weren’t intending to, lock everyone down forever until the economy was in total flames, nor would we wish to continue the experiment
b) some of you were too smart to pay attention to what worked, because “muh paycheck!”
c) TANSTAAFL

4) You (for any value of that term) have essentially decided to throw everyone who dies from this under the bus, in order to preserve the economy.
a) You did it, are doing it, and want to. Own it.
I’m not judging which is better, but don’t try and soft-soap and sugarcoat the decision you made, and the consequences as a direct result.
b) Don’t yap and yammer about your anti-abortion creds, if you’re willing to kill people at the end of life as casually as the Governor of Virginia is willing to kill them at the beginning.
Like Esau, you’ve sold your credibility there for a mess of pottage, and there are consequences to that sale. As noted in one tale, “we’ve already established what sort of person you are; now we’re simply discussing the price”.
c) There was a right way to do this, but most of the country couldn’t wait for that.
Suture self. And tell granny and gramps you loved them, and will miss them.

5) Get used to your masks, unless you like bilateral multifocal pneumonia.
a) Unless you’re Mary Mallon.
b) And deserve her fate.

6) You have no wild idea who’s sick, and who’s healthy, never did, and probably never will.
a) You DGAF, never did, and probably never will.
b) You have not hired Helen Keller as your crossing guard on the freeway.
c) EVERYONE is Helen Keller crossing the freeway.
d) Kung Flu is the 5000 busses upstream from you.

7) Good luck with your choices, and may the odds ever be in your favor.

8) I told you before, you’re not going to get what you like, and you’re not going to like what you’ll get.

9) This is a virus. It’s real. It kills people. There’s no recognized effective treatment, and no vaccine, and neither truth will change, probably this year, at least. There’s no evidence – none, nada, zip, niente, bupkus – that getting this confers any immunity to re-infection or that any such thing as “herd immunity” will ever be achieved. Not least of which because it’s been genetically altered with SARS, Ebola, and HIV sequences in the gene. (Thanks, Dr. Frankensteins!)

Luckily for you, it “only” kills about 1-3% of people who get it. That’s 1/30th-1/90th of Ebola. It’s 20-30 times worse than the flu. But it can’t be reasoned with, it can’t be bargained with, it’ll just keep coming.

Bonus: Getting it symptomatically creates permanent damage to the lungs and other organs, even if you survive.
And as you’re seeing now, (and 30-50% of those reading this will totally ignore, no matter how many times we tell it to you) the deaths from this virus are the least of your worries in the grand scheme of things, compared to the other 5000 consequences to life in society.

10) This virus doesn’t give a flaming bag of dogsh*t what your politics are, what whackdoodle conspiracy theories you espouse, who you voted for, or for the Constitution and Bill of Rights. People on both sides politically are so full of sh*t about this crisis their eyes are brown, and stupidity is no exclusive province for either side. (No, really. And I can show you their blogs and press releases.)

11) You ain’t seen nothing yet.
You’re not crawling out of this.
You’re not even close to the crawling-out-of-this stage.
You’re still in the crawling-into–it stage.
You have no idea how deep this swamp is, and while one can only ever walk halfway into such a swamp, you had no idea how big it was when you walked into it, thus when the halfway point was will only be determined after you come out the other side, retroactively.

Hurts, don’t it?

Raconteur Report: Remember These -Clowns?

Aesop at Raconteur Report is an anesthetist currently dealing with covid-19 patients. He has been commenting on the pandemic for weeks now and has become increasingly fed up with people’s ability to believe only what they want to in regards to the virus. In Remember These —Clowns? Aesop once again tackles the ridiculously incompetent viral interview by Drs. Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi from California who foolishly estimated a fatality rate of 0.03% for the virus based on their own inability to understand statistics. As previously noted, Aesop has been fed up for a few weeks, so his articles are liberally sprinkled with colorful epithets which may well be offensive to some.

…I asked four doctors at work this week about the (now banned) video; they’d all seen it, and I got three facepalms, and one double facepalm, by way of their thoughts on the content. The latter from someone who went to medical school with them. Emergency medicine is a very small pond, as it turns out.

But it also turns out I wasn’t the only one to see through their bullsh#t in about a minute.
Besides about a hundred YouTube and Twitter takedowns of their ascientific horsesh…er, rose fertilizer, everyone not wowed by their name-imprinted scrub tops has pretty much debunked every bit of malarkey they pimped last week. To the point that even the MSM has taken official notice of what legendary internet idiots they were:

(KQED) Drs. Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi, co-owners of Accelerated Urgent Care, which offers Bakersfield’s only private walk-in COVID-19 testing site, held a press conference on April 22 to report their conclusions about COVID-19 test results. During the conference, broadcast on YouTube, the doctors said that 12% of Californians tested so far have been infected. Extrapolating that to the general population, they estimated that as many as 5 million Californians have likely contracted the virus. They then used the total number of COVID-19 deaths statewide (roughly 1,200, as of last week) to calculate a death rate of just 0.03% — similar to the average death rate from seasonal flu.

“Millions of cases, small amount of death,” Erickson stressed repeatedly during the press conference, saying fears about the virus were overblown and questioning the need for widespread quarantine measures.

But public health experts were quick to point out the major flaws in the doctors’ methodology – namely that only a tiny percentage of Californians have actually been tested, a group that is more likely to test positive and is not representative of the larger population.

They were also quick to debunk the doctors’ findings as misguided and riddled with statistical errors — and an example of the kind of misleading information they are forced to waste precious time disputing.

The doctors should never have assumed that the patients they tested — who came for walk-in COVID-19 tests or who sought urgent care for symptoms they experienced in the middle of a pandemic — are representative of the general population, said Dr. Carl Bergstrom, a University of Washington biologist who specializes in infectious disease modeling. He likened their extrapolations to “estimating the average height of Americans from the players on an NBA court.” And most credible studies of COVID-19 death rates are far higher than the ones the doctors presented.

“They’ve used methods that are ludicrous to get results that are completely implausible,” Bergstrom said.

In a rare statement late Monday, the American College of Emergency Physicians and the American Academy of Emergency Medicine declared they “emphatically condemn the recent opinions released by Dr. Daniel Erickson and Dr. Artin Messihi. These reckless and untested musings do not speak for medical societies and are inconsistent with current science and epidemiology regarding COVID-19. As owners of local urgent care clinics, it appears these two individuals are releasing biased, non-peer reviewed data to advance their personal financial interests without regard for the public’s health.”

Those who support continuing to shelter in place described the doctors as self-promoters whose chain of urgent care centers would benefit from reopening. Non-COVID medical visits have plummeted during the pandemic, they note, endangering the practices of many doctors.

“As struggling business owners, their economic frustration is understandable. But it can’t be mistaken for science. People trust doctors,” Michigan emergency room doctor Rob Davidson wrote on Twitter. “When they tell Fox viewers to ignore recommendations from real experts, many will believe them. … The impact of rejecting science-proven recommendations in exchange for these erroneous ideas would overwhelm health systems and cost lives. While re-opening the economy might be good for their Urgent Care Centers (sic), it would kill medical personnel on the actual front lines.”

Word to your mother: ACEP and AAME aren’t political organs, they’re professional organizations, representing not two urgent care doctors, but 31,000 and 37,000 (respectively) board-certified emergency room physicians, and they tend to stay apolitical. So when they tell you you’re full of sh#t, jointly, in public, in front of everyone, and make a special web page to make an example out of you and call you out as poster children for how not to do your job, it’s the equivalent of the Pope telling a priest he’d better re-think his doctrine, as the archbishops start pilling up bundles of kindling, straw, and wood around the priest’s feet.

The inside-baseball word is that these two wingnuts may have their board certifications challenged with BCEM, and have it pulled as a result of being this egregiously and publicly stupid. They’re concerned, based on video views before it was pulled, that the average person can’t tell the difference between these two jackasses, and any other ER doctor.

There are limits, it seems, to how big a jackass ACEP /AAEM will tolerate, and still allow someone to practice as a certified emergency doctor.

Which means business at those two idiots’ urgent care center is about to take an even bigger turn for the worse.

I’ve told you before, half of all doctors (nurses, veterinarians, and everyone else) graduated in the bottom half of their class. There’s no crime per se in that, but it also means their degree or license doesn’t trump everyone with more IQ points than they have, who subsequently points out their shortcomings. With a flamethrower.

But those of you desperate for anything to bolster a weak position probably shouldn’t so quickly latch onto guys willing to set themselves on fire, personally and professionally, just to tout conclusions based on something they mined from deep up their own hindquarters.
It never ends well, for anyone.

But it’s always fun to watch from the third-person perspective.

Aesop: Civil War Is Bad

Aesop over at Raconteur Report has written a piece – Es Kommt – in which he writes that civil war in the US is inevitable unless something changes. Sane people should want to avoid civil war, because it will be truly horrible should it come to our land. “Bosnia times Rwanda” as Matt Bracken would say.

“Will America keep dividing and soon resort to open violence, as happened in 1861? Or will Americans reunite and bind up our wounds, as we did following the upheavals of the 1930s Great Depression or after the protests of the 1960s?

The answer lies within each of us.

Every day we will either treat each other as fellow Americans, with far more uniting than dividing us, or we will continue on the present path that eventually ends in something like a hate-filled Iraq, Rwanda or the Balkans.”

Hanson has correctly described a binary outcome:
Either the lunacy will stop, or the country will rend itself.

Either/or.

1, or 0.

And he described it, not to put too fine a point on it, in exactly the terms put forward by Matt Bracken years since:

Bracken:
“Bosnia, times Rwanda”
Hanson:
“we will continue on the present path that eventually ends in something like a hate-filled Iraq, Rwanda or the Balkans.”

Hanson is not an instigator, he’s a historian.
He’s showing, with painful precision, that following the edge of this straight-ruler to its logical end leads to flying off a cliff into an abyss at speed, unless people see that inevitable denouement, and decide within themselves to turn away…

…Again, Hanson is not suggesting anything; he’s stating with mathematical precision that either things will be done differently, or there will be a conflagration. He is mathematically correct and precise in this formulation.

Having laid out the consequences, I don’t think he’s in denial about the current state of affairs at all. When one guy, or five guys on the ‘net say “Civil War”, it may be just Tulipomania. When everyone is starting to sound like a chorus, including Stanford historians, there is beginning to be something to it…

…And unlike Hiroshima 73 years ago last month, it won’t go off 8000 miles away from home. It’ll be happening on your block, and mine.

So then what was suggested was adding a line about “redrawing borders”. Srsly?

How did that work in Yugoslavia? Iraq? How about Rwanda, or anywhere in Africa, in all of history, inclusive?

This isn’t a red v. blue classic set-piece battle, because your town, your block, your apartment building, and in some cases your own bedroom are purple.

That’s going to be Stalingrad, not Waterloo.
Hue, not Gettysburg.
Not Hatfields & McCoys, but rather War Of The Roses...

Click here to read the entire article at Raconteur Report.